I combine new and traditional media to create unfamiliar experiences of that which we encounter every day. My art attempts to intercept taken for granted categories such as ‘body,’ ‘language,’ ‘vision,’ ’space’ or ‘power.’ It works to refigure fixed subject / object hierarchies as unexpected and dynamic engagements.

For example, I might attempt to blur the lines between body and language through pieces that ask us to confuse the two. In my interactive installation, stuttering (2003 / 2009 update), viewers-turned-participants use their entire bodies to touch and trigger activation points laid out in a Mondrian-styled grid. Each rectangle in the work’s projected image is not filled with primary colors, but animated text and spoken word. The saturation of these ‘virtual buttons’ creates an inverse relationship: move quickly, and the piece will itself stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage; move carefully, even cautiously - stutter with your body - and both meaning and bodies emerge. Viewers must navigate their arms and hands, legs and feet, or neck and head, laboriously back and forth, on and off, each individual button. They shift between intention and passivity, speaking and listening, to control the piece. How the interaction works is transparent and easy to understand, but the performance it engenders is often alien to those involved. Participants move in ways they normally wouldn’t, and through this, experience communication and embodiment as difficult and non-transparent.

Central to my work are the feedback loops between our experience of the world (via embodiment and perception, for example), our movements within it (through performance and performative acts), and our understandings of it (in language and signs). I want to foster greater dialogue around these complex systems and their relationships to affect and meaning-making.

In my Compressionism series of prints (2006 and ongoing), I strap a custom-made scanner appendage and battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism of my relationship to the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are re-stretched and colored on my laptop, then produced as archival art objects using photographic or inkjet processes. I often take details from these images and iteratively re-make them as traditional prints: lithographs, etchings, engravings and woodcuts, among others. Compressionism follows the trajectory of Impressionist painting, through Surrealism to Postmodernism, but rather than citing crises of representation, reality or simulation, my focus is on performing all three in relation to each other.

Here I ‘per-form’ the landscape to challenge notions of a ‘pre-formed’ world, or sense, or meaning. By engaging with the unfinished and in-process within my work, I seek to challenge the nature of what is ‘given.’ While my interactive spaces and Compressionism series investigate performance through intimate gestures, my other works weave together a wide variety of new technologies, art-making tools and found materials to produce videos, public interventions and prints that pose questions about how and what we perform socially. This could be through dialogue, as a community, or within the broader contexts of history and recent news. The ‘work’ is in unpacking, problematizing and making strange.

In my ongoing series of generative video works, for instance, I use simple formulas to edit and compress popular movies, revealing secret biases, hidden meanings and impenetrable relationships just below the surface. In at interval (2006), I removed all dialogue from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, leaving only 13 minutes of stutters, gasps, and oral fumbles. Just as in stuttering, this work articulates the in-betweens, accents the impossibilities within language.

My Sentimental Constructions (2007) are public works with similarly interventionist goals. These are architectural structures made of rope, built to scale and held up by live performers. They are ephemeral arrangements that carve out space and frame their contexts. Each twists the idea of ‘public place’ by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch the form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the onlookers-turned-participants, who give the piece an/other performative turn. Sentimental Constructions have been thus far performed in Croatia and South Africa; each design was released under a Creative Commons license, so as to encourage international participants to re-make and re-define their own public places around the world.

For Doin’ my part to lighten the load (2008), I convinced arts critic Sean O’Toole, editor of Art South Africa magazine, to give up any use of electricity for 24 hours. In the dark hours of the evening, I offered paid South African ‘laborers’ - car or security guards, house painters, and/or tile-layers that could be solicited on the street - to assist him as needed; they were armed with hand-crank generators and small light bulbs. Here I attempted to bring to light structures of power in post-Apartheid South Africa: black and white, rich and poor, artist and critic, on and off ‘the grid,’ among others. O’Toole and I spent weeks debating the pre-set rules for this event, where he asked about everything from his safety to the art work’s merit. In the end, the night wound up as a fun and honest discussion of the aforementioned relationships between all those involved, over beer, pizza and a bit of singing. An installation and online documentation consist of vestiges of the performance: letters, photos, hand-written notes, the generators and bulbs.

Wikipedia Art (with Scott Kildall, 2009) instead questions structures of power and knowledge in the Age of the Internet. Here we wrote about, and then initiated, an art work composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone can edit. Through a social and creative feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that I call ‘performative citations,’ the piece began as an intervention, turned into an object, and was killed and resurrected on the Wikipedia site several times over. Wikipedians, artists, critics, bloggers, geeks and journalists debated epistemology via hundreds of sites and publications worldwide, each community continuously transforming what the work was and did and meant simply through their writing and talking about it.

And in Distill Life (collaborations with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, 2009 and ongoing), I approach both old and new media as form. I permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. I incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure, etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional. My juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content - print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. I work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

Academic inquiry and writing are essential parts of my practice. In addition to an undergraduate degree in design and graduate studio art degree, I hold a humanities-based PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and continue to write articles, reviews and artist perspectives for various mainstream and academic publications, as well as the spaces between. My dissertation builds on contemporary thinking around affect, embodiment, and interactivity in order to implement new critiquing and production models for participatory art. My artistic and text-based research perpetually feed back in to one another.

Through performance, provocation and play, my work seeks to infold our unfolding relationships with the world, and with one another. I invite viewers to explore, to embody, and to re-imagine, every day.

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